Radical Acceptance EDSA reclassifies the highway as a linear barangay with its own captain and mobile confession booth
MMDA Unveils Traffic Scheme Requiring Motorists to Simply Accept Their Fate
MANILA – The Metropolitan Manila Development Authority on Monday unveiled its most ambitious traffic management program in a generation, a comprehensive scheme called Radical Acceptance EDSA, under which motorists stuck on the capital’s main artery will no longer be promised improvement of any kind and will instead receive government-issued guidance on making peace with their situation.
The program, launched at a press conference that started 90 minutes late because the speakers were on EDSA, replaces decades of number coding schemes, yellow lanes, U-turn slots, and elevated promises with a single unified policy described in the official memorandum as “letting go.”
A New Philosophy of Congestion
“For fifty years we have treated traffic as a problem to be solved,” said MMDA spokesperson Atty. Regina Villaflor, standing before a projection of EDSA at 6 p.m., which several reporters initially mistook for a photograph of a parking lot. “We have tried engineering. We have tried enforcement. We have tried prayer, officially, twice. Today we announce a paradigm shift. Traffic is not a problem. Traffic is a place. Sixteen million people live in Metro Manila, and at any given moment, four million of them live on EDSA. We are simply the first administration honest enough to provide them government services there.”
Under the scheme, the stretch from Monumento to Magallanes will be reclassified as a linear barangay, complete with its own captain, a health center operating out of a converted bus, and voter registration conducted window to window during rush hour, which planners note “guarantees a captive electorate in the most literal sense achieved by any democracy.”
Amenities for the Permanently in Transit
The rollout includes what the MMDA calls “dignity infrastructure.” Vendors selling fishballs and bottled water, long the unofficial lifeline of the gridlocked, will be issued official vests and absorbed into the civil service with full benefits, backdated, in the words of the order, “to the beginning of traffic, estimated 1974.” A mobile confession booth staffed by chaplains will patrol the northbound lanes, where studies show motorists commit an average of eleven venial sins per kilometer, rising to mortal during habagat season.
Commuters, long accustomed to schemes announced with fanfare and abandoned with silence, expressed a weary appreciation for the new candor. “At least this one is honest,” said Jerome Palacios, 41, an accountant who has commuted from Fairview to Makati for sixteen years and who, by his own calculation, has spent four full years of his life on EDSA, “which is longer than I spent in high school, and I learned less.”
Palacios said he has already applied for a certificate of residency in the new linear barangay, which entitles him to run for its council. His platform, he said, is “more shade.”
Experts Weigh In
Urban planners reacted with the enthusiasm of people who have been screaming into a pillow since the Ramos administration. Dr. Consuelo Bautista of the National Center for Transport Studies called the scheme “the first traffic policy in Philippine history with a 100 percent chance of meeting its stated goal, because its stated goal is nothing.” Her institute’s latest study found that the average EDSA commuter travels at 11 kilometers per hour, roughly the speed of a determined carabao, though the carabao, the study notes, “does not stop at Guadalupe.”
The business community has begun adapting. A leading fast food chain announced lane-side delivery to vehicles moving under 5 kilometers per hour, which its market research identifies as “all of them,” while a major bank unveiled a savings product allowing motorists to open accounts during a single southbound trip, “including notarization, if traffic cooperates, which it will.”
Coverage of the announcement dominated the capital’s front pages, with the major dailies including the Philippine Daily Inquirer and The Philippine Star dispatching reporters to live along the route for a week, several of whom have reportedly declined to come home, citing “shorter commute.”
The International Angle
Foreign observers have taken interest in the model. A delegation of transport officials from Jakarta arrived Thursday to study the scheme, got stuck on the way from the airport, and conducted the entire study without leaving their van, calling it “the most immersive technical exchange of our careers.” Satirists abroad, including the desk at The London Prat, saluted Manila for “achieving what London’s M25 has only dreamed of: formal recognition,” while the humor archivists at Bohiney Magazine filed the announcement under both Comedy and Governance, a shared drawer they report is now full.
Asked whether the government had truly given up on solving traffic, Villaflor bristled. “We have not given up,” she said. “We have graduated. Solving traffic was the dream of young men. We are a mature bureaucracy now. We do not chase the impossible. We administer it. There is a difference, and the difference has a budget line.”
The program’s second phase, scheduled for next quarter, will extend radical acceptance to C5, Commonwealth Avenue, and, in what the memorandum calls “the final boss,” the Skyway toll plaza at Christmas.
As of press time, northbound EDSA was moving at 9 kilometers per hour, which the MMDA’s new official traffic bulletin described, under the fresh guidelines, as “home.”
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/